The Turkish government has told U.S. officials that it has audio and video recordings that prove Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was killed inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul this month, according to U.S. and Turkish officials.

The recordings show that a Saudi security team detained Khashoggi in the consulate after he walked in Oct. 2 to obtain an official document before his upcoming wedding, then killed him and dismembered his body, the officials said.

The audio recording in particular provides some of the most persuasive and gruesome evidence that the Saudi team is responsible for Khashoggi’s death, the officials said.

“The voice recording from inside the embassy lays out what happened to Jamal after he entered,” said one person with knowledge of the recording who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss highly sensitive intelligence.

“You can hear his voice and the voices of men speaking Arabic,” this person said. “You can hear how he was interrogated, tortured and then murdered.”

A second person briefed on the recording said men could be heard beating Khashoggi.

Khashoggi is hardly the first innocent person Mohammed bin Salman has had killed. We’re sending weapons to a regime that created a humanitarian crisis in Yemen and conducted an air strike on a school bus. But, to paraphrase Stalin, if only one man dies of torture and is cut up with a bone saw, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.

The Turkish dictatorship SAYS it has a recording. The Turkish dictatorship has a vested interest in driving a wedge between the US and Saudi.

Why on earth would anyone assume Turkish claims, sans actual evidence (such as priding a copy of the recording to the US), are credible? Doing so is as preposterous as taking Saudi denials as proof they didn’t do it.

BTW, you quote Stalin (One of the worst monsters in human history), so I’ll use that to address the big picture here; do you think it was okay for the US to ally itself with Stalin? Likewise, should we shoot ourselves in the foot by cutting off arms sales to Saudi? Strategically, we need Saudi to be a counter to Iran, just like we needed Stalin against Hitler.

If indeed the Saudis killed Kashogi, I don’t suggest turning a blind eye. I just don’t want to see us do something as self-defeating as cutting off arms sales to them.

I don’t know if the claims about Khashoggi are true or not, but if he actually was a Muslim Brotherhood supporter and propagandist, then if the Saudis actually did this (which is looking ever more doubtful) we should send them a thank-you card.

They story does appear to be falling apart though. Some questions I have are, why was Kahshoggi going to the Saudi consulate? If, as people who talked to him claim, he said he was in fear for his life, why do that? The excuse I’ve seen is he wanted to get permission to marry his fiance. That doesn’t wash; he doesn’t need Saudi permission to do that.

Also, who beside the Turks have said she’s his fiance? No one that I can see. And, lastly, he supposedly gave her his phone, then recorded his visit and death on his apple watch. How, exactly? That’s a bluetooth class 2 device. So, in perfect conditions, it has a range of about 30 feet. And buildings aren’t perfect conditions. Where was his fiance parked, in the lobby?

If Kahshoggi actually did go the the consulate (the CCTV shots provided show someone who looks like him, not definitively him) did he then leave before vanishing? Again, we seem to have only the Erdogon regime’s say-so.

So far, as far as I know, all we have is the say-so of the Turks. And the Turks have a very vested interest in harming Saudi; Qatar, which is aligned with Iran and is in a standoff with Saudi, has several thousand Turkish troops deployed there.

The Turks have prime motive to create an incident, and so too does Iran.

If he supported freedom and liberalism within Islam but wrote articles like this nevertheless supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, we should thank the Saudis for torturing and killing him?

The United States’s aversion to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is more apparent in the current Trump administration, is the root of a predicament across the entire Arab world. The eradication of the Muslim Brotherhood is nothing less than an abolition of democracy and a guarantee that Arabs will continue living under authoritarian and corrupt regimes. In turn, this will mean the continuation of the causes behind revolution, extremism and refugees — all of which have affected the security of Europe and the rest of the world. Terrorism and the refugee crisis have changed the political mood in the West and brought the extreme right to prominence there.

I can’t subscribe to this line of thought. I don’t agree with him, but I don’t think he deserves to be tortured and killed for expressing such opinions, and I find the assertion to the contrary to be shocking.

If Kahshoggi was, as claimed, a Muslim Brotherhood member and supporter, he most certainly was not a supporter of freedom or liberalism within Islam; he was the opposite, a hardcore islamist. And *if* that’s true, and *if* the Saudis killed him, I have no problem whatsoever saying send them a thank-you card and be done with it.

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